Richard Sandomir writes about Roger Angell of The New Yorker, the J.G. Taylor Spink honoree into the Baseball Hall of Fame for his writing. Now 93, Angell joins the company of Ring Lardner, Red Smith, Shirley Povich and Dick Young.

His baseball essays for the magazine in 1962. He had no previous experience covering the sport, and he never shared the experience of newspaper writers under daily deadlines:

“I didn’t have to write after a game. That was unforgivable.”

Most of his 10 books are devoted to baseball, including the trilogy of “The Summer Game, Five Seasons and “Season Ticket” that were pulled together for “The Roger Angell Baseball Collection” published last year.

He doesn’t write magazine-length pieces any longer but pens shorter blog posts, including this one on the recently departed Don Zimmer.

“I didn’t write about baseball because I was looking for the heart and soul of America. I don’t care if baseball is the national pastime or not. The thing about baseball is, it’s probably the hardest game to play. The greatest hitters are only succeeding a third of the time. If you take a great athlete who’s never played baseball and put him in the infield, he’s lost.”

“Baseball is linear — it’s like writing. In other sports, there’s a lot going on at the same time. You can’t quite take it all in.”

“I’m not dead and not yet mindless in a reliable upstate facility. Decline and disaster impend, but my thoughts don’t linger there. It shouldn’t surprise me if at this time next week I’m surrounded by family, gathered on short notice—they’re sad and shocked but also a little pissed off to be here—to help decide, after what’s happened, what’s to be done with me now. It must be this hovering knowledge, that two-ton safe swaying on a frayed rope just over my head, that makes everyone so glad to see me again. ‘How great you’re looking! Wow, tell me your secret!’ they kindly cry when they happen upon me crossing the street or exiting a dinghy or departing an X-ray room, while the little balloon over their heads reads, ‘Holy shit—he’s still vertical!’ ”

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As a federal judge is set to rule on O’Bannon v. NCAA — which could dramatically alter the landscape of college athletics — Steve Fainaru and Tom Farrey profile the lead plaintiffs’ attorney for ESPN‘s “Outside the Lines.”

“Game changer” examines the sports-related legal career of Michael Hausfeld, a hard-driving Washington class-action litigator who’s burned bridges with his former law firm as well as some of his former clients, including professional football players.

Hausfeld admittedly knows nothing about sports, and revealed it during the O’Bannon trial this summer. But he was deeply influenced by reading former NCAA executive director Walter Byers’ 1997 mea culpa, “Unsportsmanlike Conduct.”

The Byers book, Fainaru and Farrey write:

” . . . asserts that, with his help, the NCAA erected a ‘nationwide money-laundering scheme’ that enriches conferences, schools, coaches and TV networks on the backs of unpaid athletes. Byers confessed that he helped invent the term ‘student-athlete’ to shield the NCAA from having to pay the players.

“To Hausfeld, the book was ‘an amazing revelation’ that helped convince him he had a case. He found that other economists had reached the same conclusions about the NCAA. Two years after the publication of Byers’ book, a former Berkeley economics professor named Ernie Nadel was watching a bowl game when an announcer mentioned that Florida coach Steve Spurrier earned $2 million a year. Nadel approached one of his colleagues, Dan Rascher, and asked how it could be that the head football coach for a public university was making so much money.

“That inquiry ultimately led to one of the first class-action antitrust cases against the NCAA. Rascher and fellow economist [Andy] Schwarz hoped the case would go to trial. But in 2008, attorneys accepted a $10 million settlement from the NCAA for ‘bona fide educational expenses’ to be distributed to some 12,000 athletes over a three-year period. The lawyers made almost as much money. The NCAA emerged unscathed. Schwarz and Rascher were furious. Hausfeld, who hired them as expert witnesses, gave their cause new life.

“All Hausfeld needed was a name to attach to the case.”

But previous sports clients offered a cautionary tale in dealing with Hausfeld, who represented former NFL players in a 2011 case. Six NFL star retirees sued, claiming the league illegally used their identities in NFL Films productions. Hausfeld worked a $50 million settlement (with another $8 million going to lawyers) that included no direct payment to players or insurance, which some players, including Buffalo Bills Hall of Fame offensive lineman Joe DeLamielleure, said was all they wanted.

Instead, he was among those thinking Hausfeld sold them out, and the bitter haggling between lawyer and players continued into 2012. Said DeLamielleure:

“I thought he was sent from God to help us. Then I realized he was the devil.”

Before the winter set in, Alex Belth penned this marvelous tribute to his late father and how “his remaining connection to the sport was the two Rogers, Roger Angell and Roger Kahn. They have been linked in my mind ever since.”

The SB Nation Longform article delves deeply into that linkage, what “The Old Man” thought of the writers and their works, and Belth’s more recent encounters with both Rogers after his father’s death.

Afterward, as he held his father’s copy of “The Boys of Summer,” the son admitted it was “about a father and son connecting through baseball:”

I imagined Dad reading the book when it was published forty years ago. He was married to a beautiful woman and his career in TV was flourishing, his fantasies being realized. I understood how he could have seen himself in Kahn. But he didn’t have Kahn’s drive or professional discipline. Yet if the Old Man never achieved the professional success he craved, if sobriety was not the perfect tool to repair his own spiritual wreckage, and if he wasn’t always the father I needed him to be, he was not a failure. He taught me about generosity and compassion, to value hard work and effort, and above all, how to appreciate a good story.

It was the difference, in the end, between what we want to be and who we are.

With the winter still doggedly hanging around as March and spring training have arrived, I’ve read over this story several times, trying to forge another connection that has eluded my grasp. Perhaps the timing isn’t anything more than coincidental, but I’ve always found the baseball off-season the perfect time to plumb the deeper chords of memory.

After all, this is a sport that, at least in America, is shrouded by its past like no other. The familial connections that Belth so eloquently explores are a strong example of why this is.

I have no such links, given that my father wasn’t a passionate baseball fan. I can’t recall him ever reading much about the game, much less watching or following it.

Not long after my parents were married, and before they started a family, he attended Milwaukee Braves games at County Stadium with my mother’s uncles.

After the Braves followed us to Atlanta, and as I was deeply immersed in my first sporting love, there were a few games we attended together at Atlanta Stadium. I remember wearing my full softball uniform, including stirrups, cap and glove. Only my plastic cleats had to be sacrificed, in the name of practicality, for sneakers.

Soon after the marriage dissolved, like that of Belth’s parents, and the memories of those times are rather short.

But they keep recurring as I proceed in middle age, fighting the urge to traffick in cheap nostalgia. Are memories what we try to revive and understand when we wonder if there’s not much more to look forward to? A devoted baseball fan would say not; there are always new memories waiting to be created. Their meaning, like a fine wine, requires years to distill.

And now I’m sounding like the baseball poets, something I avidly seek to avoid, and the subject of tomorrow’s post. Grapefruit and Cactus League games are underway, and a month of anticipation is counting down. A friend of mine, on Facebook, is posting a “Brave of the day” baseball card, which evokes even more memories. We’re roughly the same age, so we share the same timeline that predates the Braves’ spectacular success of the 1990s.

He remembers, as I do, “crowds” of 2,000 or so at Atlanta-Fulton County Stadium (the name change didn’t do much except placate petty politicians), and being implored by Milo Hamilton to show support for a team 35 games out of first place.

That scolding always rubbed me the wrong way, and he thankfully got out of town and off local airwaves. But it never soured me on the obsession of following an utterly hopeless team, or feeling devastated when the rare fat years (I’m especially thinking 1982 here) were followed by so many more lean ones.

My friend just wants the baseball season to hurry up and get here, and I have to admit I’ve been eager for it to return. After a number of years of feigning only idle interest stemming from the 1994 strike, I’ve come to realize that it’s such a foolish thing, to “boycott” something you love so much. You’re stunting your own understanding of the memories that have shaped you, and not just as a baseball fan.

I’ve truly enjoyed the last few summers of turning on a game and letting it take me back, way back. Steadily, this has helped me catch up to what the game has meant to me on a deeper level than who won, who lost, and what the standings look like today.

It’s that connection that gets switched on when March turns to April, and as the bitter cold of winter melts into an early spring.